... the book is far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler.

... as Katz travels in the footsteps of Butler, from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Shanghai, China and back, he illuminates how the Corps had been used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to make de facto colonies out of the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He also does a masterful job detailing our 1914 invasion of Mexico and the 1900 and 1927 occupations of China.

Gangsters of Capitalism uncovers the ex-Marine’s hidden moments of personal reckoning while turning an unsentimental eye on the real evils he committed during his time as a blunt instrument of US domination.

Lively, deeply researched.

This book is really two books mashed into one, and not as successfully as they might have been. Katz's account of his own visits intrudes on his account of Smedley's life, and his indictment of military policy is interrupted by the constant return to biography. Only for military history completists..

A searing and well-documented portrait of early 20th-century U.S. imperialism focused on the career of U.S. Marine Corps major general Smedley D. Butler.

A relevant, readable effort to link past American colonialism to the present impulse to install homegrown leaders for life..